Economic Totalitarianism and the Fiscal Cliff

In an article titled We’re Heading For Economic Dictatorship, Janet Daley of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada breaks down the economic totalitarianism we now face as the so-called “double-dip recession” rears its ugly head. Daley describes how economies manipulated by central banks ultimately terminate in redistributive socialism designed to loot the producers and impose a grinding austerity across the board.

“In this dystopian future there would have to be permanent austerity programs,” she writes. “This would not only mean cutting government spending, which is what ‘austerity’ means now, but the real kind: genuine falls in the standard of living of most working people, caused not just by frozen wages and the collapse in the value of savings (due to repeated bouts of money-printing), but also by the shortages of goods that will result from lack of investment and business expansion, not to mention the absence of cheaper goods from abroad due to import controls.”

Daley correctly compares what is now emerging in the West to what brought down the Soviet Union. She writes that the West will increasingly use “the social and political structures that the East employed. As the fixed pot of national wealth loses ever more value, and resources shrink, the measures to enforce ‘fair’ distribution must become more totalitarian: there will have to be confiscatory taxation on assets and property, collectivization of the production of goods, and directed labor.”